The Kingdom of Little Wounds (8 page)

S
O,
writes the chronicler,
it always is for royal brides;
though Princess Sophia never had the chance to suffer among the apish Swedes. Perhaps this would be considered a sort of blessing. The chronicler has witnessed the sorrows of Queen Isabel and her gradual decline these past ten years; she might be glad to know her daughter has been spared those same trials.

But he is a historian, not a moralist. He does not interpret facts; nor does he make judgments. That is for others to do as time passes.

He slips this paper into his bed canopy to mingle with his other private observations.

T
HE Lunedie chapel, the great cathedral, the parish towers all over town: every church bell clucks its tongue over Sophia’s death. They scour away sleep.

In the midst of life,
shout the bells,
we are in death.
The householders of Skyggehavn rouse themselves, blinking, and hang black cloths from their windows. The canals reflect wavering black; the bakers char the bread.

The story of Sophia’s death spreads with the waves of noise, till it is well established that the Devil himself (in the guise of a Swede) tried to pluck the girl from her bed, then fought an angel for her soul. The angel, it is said, carried the princess bodily to Heaven so that Satan couldn’t ravish her.

“Nonsense,” say the priests. “A fantasy,” say the scholars. But there are many who believe, and who carve Sophia’s portrait into their walls with knives and nails, praying that she might protect them from Devil, trolls, and Protestants.

At the palace, Sophia Lunedie has left a very real and material corpse. Before the bells ring the sun overhead, that corpse has begun to rot. It fills the rooms with the reek of an overripe strawberry, an odor that makes mouths water and stomachs churn at the same time. The green flies of May buzz around it, and black ants nibble from below. Blood and serum from her necklace of wounds have hardened into dark jewels around which the princess’s flesh is starting to melt.

In the speed of its corruption, the girl’s body presents several questions. Perhaps least among these is the
how
of her death; whether from
Morbus Lunediernus
or some other cause, it almost doesn’t matter. More important: Is she Princess of the realm or Duchess of Östergötland — that is, did the Duke complete the union before his bride’s demise? An answer must be found immediately. So much blood streaks the sheets that no one can be sure; even the Duke himself might not know, given the uproar in their marriage bed. No one would dream of breaching etiquette by posing him the question directly, and no one would trust Mad Magnus with an honest reply. Yet everything depends on the answer. If the marriage was not consummated, the treaty with Sweden hasn’t been ratified, and the new peace may unravel. Then all of Scandinavia might very well be back at war.

To some of the nobles, Sophia’s death is good news: the marriage was not universally popular. Several lords favored a connection with Denmark; but Denmark’s Frederick chose a different Sophia, of the obscure Mecklenburg-Güstrow, whom he will marry this July. (And what a hurry to be sure that Magnus’s wedding took place before Frederick’s! There is no affair that does not become competition between Denmark and Sweden.) Others in the privy council loathe Protestants of any sort and insist that a Lunedie should marry only with Poland or France. Any of these men might have resolved to undo the treaty with a death, though without the greater offense of killing Duke Magnus himself.

In his grandly paneled Presence Chamber, King Christian charges the three physicians with finding an answer. “Dissection is not usual,” he bleats, sounding something like the sheep to which his subjects often compare him. He has a long, sad face and graying curls; a long body clumping in the middle. Princess Sophia was the treasure of his heart, and he hates to think of her nude body inspected, much less sliced open — but better this than his land sliced apart in another war. “It is not usual, but in this instance it is essential. Investigate . . . by the necessary means . . . and determine whether she’s my daughter or Magnus’s wife.”

His principal advisers and favorites — the aged Duke of Marsvin, sly Willem Braj, Lord Rafael af Hvas, and the handsome Lord Nicolas Bullen (this one having wandered over from Queen Isabel’s household) — give nods of support. Their King is never alone in his decisions, never alone at all, in fact, even when he steps into his more private inner chamber and the cabinet of the stool. A few other favorites are draped about the room, toying with their jewels or snuffling pomanders to combat the stench of daily life and extraordinary death. Everyone’s head aches, and no one wants to touch the remains of last night’s feast.

“And try to see if Sophia was poisoned,” says King Christian, deliberately but as if in afterthought. It is his secret hope that his darling has died from some such outside cause — that it was not her marriage that brought on death. He would have kept her at court years longer if she hadn’t been needed in this endless game of diplomacy. Of course, the poison might have resulted from the marriage act — or some unthinkable source close to home . . . He feels the usual pain in his belly, so familiar, flare into intense cramping. Also increasingly familiar. He can hardly bear to sit, and a tear hovers at his eyelid.

Under their loose black hats, the three physicians dart looks at one another, seeing if any can guess the King’s preference in this matter. Does he
want
his daughter to have been murdered? The general if unspoken conclusion is that he does; poison must be more desirable than a fatal disease of the Lunedie bloodline, as it speaks less to the other children’s future. Those six children — five of them girls — are all that stand between an orderly succession and chaos. There isn’t even a well-trained by-blow, for example, to take inheritance if King Christian dies suddenly, only some distant cousins who will squabble over the crown. It is somewhat to be lamented that this king has never made a bastard; he is so faithful to his wife that the favorites have often speculated as to his conscience, as if a small virtue must conceal a great secret sin.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” murmur Candenzius, Venslov, and Dé, and they give a practiced bow as one. Both King and Queen like to see them in unison.

Perhaps there actually is a poison plot afoot. Perhaps the physicians really will detect it.

Two tears now roll down Christian’s white-powdered face. “My poor pretty girl,” he laments, almost inaudibly.

Nicolas Bullen appears at Christian’s side without seeming to move. He offers the King a pomander in the shape of a skull, and his dark fingers brush against Christian’s damp ones. When Nicolas touches a spring at the pomander’s top, the skull breaks apart into eight sections, each with a different-smelling spice inside.

“Take solace,” says Nicolas. His light blue-green eyes are wide and kind. “Health to your soul.”

Christian likes Lord Nicolas very much. The Bullens are a clever family; they have curried favor and married well, though Nicolas is the last of them. His father was a minor officer in Christian’s father’s household, his grandfather little more than a craftsman who had something to do with building the palace but who managed to wed a baroness. Christian considers having Nicolas (who is not yet married) leave the Queen’s household and take a position in his own. He could use a man like this, one who is quietly reliable.

Thinking, the King lifts the pomander to his face. He sniffs each of the eight spices in turn, then wipes his nose and eyes with a handkerchief also provided by Lord Nicolas. A ruby ring winks on Nicolas’s forefinger and fills all Christian’s vision.

Christian feels dizzy, dazed, light-headed. The figures in the room waver.

Lord Nicolas takes back the soiled handkerchief and tucks it into his sleeve.

“Very well,” Christian says to the doctors, around a bubble of nausea. He waves limply, overcome by a falling sensation caused, he thinks, by grief. “Very well, you may begin on Sophia.” His darling child, about to be sliced open as even a husband never would have done.

Head swimming, he looks up and there is Lord Nicolas again, nodding encouragement, lips parted and showing handsome white teeth inside.

The dissection takes place in a room near the nursery, a room with a good window, a high table, and a plentiful supply of beakers and basins, plus candles for places the window doesn’t light.

Candenzius has been trusted with a key; he turns it in the lock. He will be the main operator. The most modern of the physicians, a student of the revolutionary Paracelsus rather than the ancient Galen, he made his reputation in Dresden by curing a baron’s gout with a daring dose of caustic antimony.
Any substance can be either cure or poison,
he is fond of quoting.
It is only a matter of determining the dose.

There’s no question of curing Princess Sophia, unless it is to be in the manner of leather, preserving her long enough for the funeral. The cadaver has changed yet again since Candenzius last saw it. The skin is mottled yellow and blue where it is not marked with the dried crusts of Sophia’s ulcerous wounds. That skin is peeling away in thick flakes. Her eyes, not yet sewn shut, stare cloudily toward Heaven, and her blue hands sit clenched in knots by her ribs, where her arms contracted in her final throes. Excepting that detail, she has been arranged quite prettily on the table by her former nursemaids and by Countess Elinor Parfis, Mistress of the Nursery. Sunlight caresses Sophia lovingly. The fine linen shift in which she died is spread in a swoop, its delicate embroideries stiff with blood and other fluids.

It falls to Doctor Candenzius to lift that skirt and pass judgment — first, on the state of what lies beneath it. The other two — hunched old Venslov and big-eared young Dé (whose youth makes him no less a believer in old Galen; he has yet to come down on one side or the other) — stand with basins and styluses at the ready, poised to collect viscera or take notes as needed.

What Candenzius sees under Sophia’s skirt must interest him a great deal, for he spends some minutes staring at it, gathering an initial impression. Then, holding the shift in his left hand, he uses his right to nudge her legs farther apart. He asks for a candle and a sponge.

The other physicians don’t dare gaze on the princess in this way. Venslov lights the candle and holds it at Sophia’s feet, but he doesn’t look. Dé averts his eyes, moistens a cloth in vinegar, and passes it to Candenzius, who seems satisfied, although this is not precisely what he asked for. He scrubs at the shadows on the Princess’s thighs and then orders Venslov (who was chief physician before Candenzius’s arrival last year) to hold the candle closer.

“And closer still,” he barks, leading the other two to speculate that he is using this opportunity to remind Venslov once again of their relative positions in court hierarchy.

The flame flickers in air currents stirred by the physicians’ robes. The space between Sophia’s legs is getting crowded; her nightdress blooms with light. Candenzius bends so deep, his face disappears beneath the tent of cloth.

While her body is inspected, the departed Princess continues to stare upward. Her corneas have gone white as milk, so it is impossible to see that at one time her eyes were brown. Dé wonders if he should note this, as the other two are so intimately engaged. It may have some bearing on the cause of her death. He imagines the favors that King Christian would bestow on the man who could name the poison that felled her . . . Dé would very much like a room of his own in which to live and work, rather than sharing with Venslov, and perhaps one of the minor honorific orders that the King bestows on those who’ve pleased him. An enameled giraffe on a gold chain would mean the world to Dé.

Candenzius, still peering at the Princess’s secret, stops short of probing it with his finger. He mutters to himself, wondering how the land and his own reputation are best served in this situation. Again, a question: Is there advantage to declaring the Princess
virgo intacta
? Might that finding anger Sweden — perhaps enough to inspire a murderous plot against a lowly court physician? Or the King: Is he likely to punish Candenzius for breaking the treaty, or would he be relieved to be released from a contract that will now yield limited advantages, given that there shall be no grandchildren, no commingling of royal seed?

He thinks of the Queen, his patroness and friend, who plucked him from Dresden on the basis of one long letter of application and an egg-size portrait enclosed with it. (Candenzius would not accuse himself of vanity, precisely, but he has been told he has fine eyes.) Isabel thought Sophia too young for marriage, too narrow for childbirth, her womanly courses a mere trickle. All this to be married off to Magnus’s madness.
Don’t we have more than reason for delay?
she asked Candenzius that winter, in one of the quiet conversations in which the two sat snug in the firelight of her chamber, attended only by a dozy lady-in-waiting whose ale Candenzius had treated with valerian.
Can’t you convince my husband to wait?

The King could not be persuaded, declaring that sacrifices must be made for the good of the land; and, in fact, he gave Candenzius a gold coin in exchange for a prescription of lamb’s blood and coltsfoot that helped shake those courses free from Sophia’s womb. So the marriage went forth, with Isabel so distraught, she needed soothing tinctures of poppy.

Out of sentiment for Isabel, and because some hunch tells him it is the desired answer, Candenzius makes a decision.

“The Princess is a virgin,” he pronounces, withdrawing and dropping the nightdress over Sophia’s legs so quickly that it nearly catches the candle.

Mercifully the gust of skirt wind blows the flame out. For good measure, Venslov licks his knobby fingertips and snuffs the wick. Fire in the palace would be a mortal calamity; his own books and papers, records of his private experiments, would surely burn.